Best for high-traffic catalogs
On-the-fly
Live per-request optimization with caching. Choose this when you want AVIF plus live quality tuning — and the ability to adjust compression on a running store without redeploying anything.
Platform feature
Transparent Image Optimization
Smaller images, faster pages — without a plugin, and without risk to your store.
Images are usually the heaviest thing on a storefront. A single category page can pull down several megabytes of product photography, and that weight lands directly on your Core Web Vitals, your mobile conversion rate, and your bandwidth bill.
The common fix is a PHP plugin that rewrites images to WebP. It works — but it solves the problem in the wrong place: inside your application. luroConnect optimizes images at the hosting layer instead, so the work happens where it belongs and never competes with your store.
How it works
Optimization at the hosting layer, not in your application.
When a shopper requests an image, our optimizer converts it to a modern format — AVIF or WebP — using a dedicated service built on libvips, one of the fastest image pipelines available. The web server caches the result and serves it directly on every request after the first. The shopper's browser gets the smallest format it supports; everyone else gets the original untouched. None of this touches your application code.
There are two modes, chosen per site:
Best for smaller catalogs
Pre-conversion
Images are queued for optimization the moment they're saved and converted in the background. Until the optimized version is ready, the original is served — so a bulk catalog upload never stalls, and no image is ever missing.
Why this beats a PHP WebP plugin
Built into the platform, not bolted onto the store.
It runs off the PHP path.
A PHP plugin converts images inside the same worker pool that renders your product pages and processes checkout. Under traffic, image conversion steals capacity from commerce. Our optimizer runs as a separate service — on a separate host for busy stores — so your application workers are never blocked by image work.
Optimized once, then served from cache.
After the first request, the optimized image is served straight from the web-server cache for up to a year. Repeat visitors and CDN cache-misses never pay the conversion cost again.
AVIF, not just WebP.
Many plugins stop at WebP. AVIF compresses noticeably harder at the same visual quality, and we serve it automatically to browsers that support it.
It never breaks a page.
If an optimized version isn't actually smaller — or if anything goes wrong at all — the original image is served automatically. Your shopper always sees the correct picture. There is no failure mode where optimization takes a page down.
It never slows a page either.
The optimizer watches its own load. If it's momentarily busy — say, a crawler hits hundreds of uncached images at once — it doesn't queue the request and make the shopper wait: the original image is served immediately instead, and optimization simply happens on a later request. Speed of delivery always wins over the size saving. A PHP plugin has no such pressure valve — under load, the conversion work and the slow response land on the same page at the same time.
No catalog bloat, no database changes.
The on-the-fly service keeps optimized images in its own cache, not in your media library or your database. Nothing to migrate in, and nothing to clean up if you ever leave.
Nothing to install or maintain in your store.
There's no extension to keep compatible across platform upgrades and no plugin settings to babysit. Because it lives at the hosting layer, the same mechanism works across Magento / Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, and other image-heavy stacks.
Tunable and measurable.
Quality and effort are adjustable globally or per image, and every optimization reports its real before-and-after byte size — so we can dial in the exact trade-off between file size and visual quality on your catalog, not on a generic preset.
At a glance
luroConnect vs. a typical PHP WebP plugin
| Typical PHP WebP plugin | luroConnect | |
|---|---|---|
| Where conversion runs | Inside PHP workers, competing with page rendering and checkout | Dedicated service, off the PHP path |
| Formats | Often WebP only | AVIF and WebP |
| Repeat requests | Per-request PHP overhead | Served from cache (up to a year) |
| Changes to your store | Extension install, config, upgrade compatibility | None — lives at the hosting layer |
| Catalog / database impact | Writes variant files, may add records | No variant files, no new records |
| If optimization fails | Varies by plugin; can serve broken or oversized images | Original served automatically; page never breaks |
| Under load | Conversion competes with the page request; both slow down | Original served instantly; optimization deferred — pages never wait |
| Platform | Usually platform-specific | Magento, WooCommerce, any image-heavy stack |
| Tuning | Usually global presets | Global and per-image, with real size reporting |
Transparent, in every sense
Everyone sees the benefit. Nobody sees the machinery.
Transparent to your store
No code, no extension, no migration.
Transparent to your shoppers
They just get faster pages and the right image, every time.
Transparent to you
Real numbers on what every image saved, and quality you can tune to taste.
That's the difference between bolting optimization onto your application and building it into the platform your store runs on.
Included with luroConnect managed hosting
Transparent image optimization ships as part of the luroConnect platform, deployed in your own AWS or GCP account. Talk to us about enabling it on your store.